Friday, May 15, 2015

The Impossible Dream

Once again, we have a double
Torah portion this week.We read the
last two portions of the book of Leviticus, Behar (Lev. 25: 1 – 26:2) and
Bechukotai (Lev. 26:3 – 27:34).

Parshah
Behar describes the Sabbatical (shemittah) and Jubilee (yovel) years as they
will be observed once the Israelites come into the land.God directs Moses to tell the people that they
may plant and reap for six years, but in the seventh year, the land must be
allowed to lie fallow.Since the
Israelites are to be an agricultural people, they too will rest in the
Sabbatical year. Following the seventh of seven cycles of years, the fiftieth
would be the Jubilee year, in which land that had been bought, sold, traded and
exchanged would be returned to the original owners and certain categories of
bondsmen and women would be freed.

Although
the Sabbatical and the Jubilee are obviously related and intertwined, there was
a significant difference in their practical application.Whether or not God’s bounty was sufficient to
see the Israelites through the seventh year, we know that the law of the
Sabbatical year was obeyed for almost the entire time that the people lived in
Israel.We have no such proof for the
observance of the Jubilee.Some modern
scholars think that it was a lofty and dramatic but ultimately unenforceable
way of reminding the Israelites that property belonged not to them but to
God.In The Torah: A Modern
Commentary, Rabbi Gunther Plaut states that: “The ideal past, which the jubilee
legislation sought to restore, probably never existed”.

The
ideal past probably never existed.The Sabbatical
year must have been difficult, but it was manageable.The Jubilee is an impossible dream.It expresses a noble goal, but a goal that
can never be achieved, because it presupposes that things can be put back as
they were and that the past can be restored.Israel, in its first flush of conquest, took possession of the land that
God had promised to its ancestors, and every fifty years, we are bidden to
return to that time.Except that it
can’t be done.People change; they die
and are born, they form new families, they move around.The land changes: there are droughts and
floods, trees fall down, rocks slide, landmarks become indistinguishable.Time takes its toll on the land and the
people.We cannot go back in time.We can re-enact, we can remember.But we cannot re-create.

The
Jubilee was intended as a means of release, and the lesson of that release for
us is spelled out by the impossibility of its observance.Perhaps what God was trying to teach us by
giving us the unmanageable task of re-creating the past is that it even though
it can’t be accomplished; humans must try it in order to learn that it will
fail.The Jubilee teaches us that we
can’t change the past, or fix it, or bring it back, but we can honor it, and we
must remember it.Because once we have
remembered and reconciled with our past, we can be released to go forward and
build our future.

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